Janet Sobel: Leading Abstract Impressionist or Primitive?

 Last week, there was a Ukrainian artist featured who is living today, but creates works based on an old system of folk art. This week is about a Ukrainian artist who passed 60 years ago, but created in the most modern of styles - Abstract Expressionism. 

Janet Olechovsky Sobel  (1893-1958) was born at a time when Russia controlled Ukraine. Her father was a victim of the Russian pogroms. In her mother's effort to make a better life for Janet and her siblings, they came to NYC when Janet was 15 years old. Within a year, she married Max Sobel and have 5 children. By age 44,with the opportunity of time, she felt a strong desire to begin painting.

 

Sobel used the process of painting on canvas to express her feelings. These were the feelings from her family's immigration, from the time under Russian rule, all of which she relived as she learned of the Holocaust. For her, emotion required mostly abstract expression. 

 

 

 

 

As Sobel matured in her work, she was noted by some of the most prestigious art critics of the 1940s. In fact, from 1943-1946, she was one of the most notable artists for her "unconscious surrealist phantasy," as stated by one art critic. 

 

 

 

By 1944, Sobel was featured not only in a one-person gallery exhibit, but also in a book about "Surrealism," as one of the "newcomers," along with Pollock, Tobey, Hoffman and others.

 

 

 

 Even Pollock admitted that he was inspired by Sobel while he denied Tobey's influences. (See Archive on right margin for December, 2009.)

Yet, post WW2 changed the woman's roll. She went from "Rosie the Riveter" supporting the war effort to being told to "go home, let the men have the jobs and get busy making babies." A woman's highest standing was as a "housewife." Sobel fell victim to this description with her matronly appearance, "looking like any Brooklyn housewife," as one critic described Sobel. 

Abstract expressionism became a male purview. Hence Pollock, Rothko, de Koonig, Motherwell, Gorky and other males moved ahead in the art world while Sobel faded. She became known as a "primitive painter" without any real formal education in the arts. That's why you might not have heard of her and her leading role in abstract expressionism.